Flipkart to lure in women shoppers during sales to spur long-term growth

E-commerce major Flipkart is on a major drive to add new female customers during the festive season sale. Currently, the e-tailer -much like its peers -sees 65% of sales coming from male consumers, while the rest is from women who typically have higher stickiness.

To get more women shoppers onto Flipkart, the home-grown e-tailer is using targeting techniques to bring cross-category offers to them. Flipkart has signed on brands in fashion, home and books -where women tend to make more transac tions than men. It has also been ramping up its collection in line with its internal data, which shows women spend 2.2 times more time than men, leading to higher conversion rate for transactions.

Flipkart claims to have over 100 million registered users and is aiming to push the women buyers' base to about 45%, going forward.

The company's effort to get more female consumers would be a challenging task because India has had more male internet users than female, but multiple studies predict this ratio is likely to change. Flipkart senior director Smrithi Ravichandran said, “We are pushing certain categories and bringing top brands exclusively onto the platform to get a new set of women users during the sale season.“ The Flipkart-owned fashion-focused e-tailer Myntra too sees higher sales from male buyers compared to females.

"The presence of more male online consumers is related to the overall internet access and jobs in the country. There are more working men than women. This is changing but it will take a while and that's reflecting on the sales data of online commerce companies," said Satish Meena, analyst at market research company Forrester. Post mining the user data, the company has lined up brands across categories to attract these new set of users like Forever 21, Aeropostle, JLo, Micheal Kors, Ritu Beri, Satya Paul, Malabar Jewelers, Gitanjali, PN Gadgil, PC Jewelers among others.